Conventionally, team members working on one or more projects within a company may get together in a huddle or micro-meeting on a regular basis to share information, discuss topics, evaluate performance, identify issues and/or solve problems collaboratively. Since the introduction of the huddle, whiteboards have acted as the traditional tool for storing all information collected during the active huddle session. However, it may not be possible for all participants in a meeting to be in the same physical location at the same time, which may create a need for modifying the current huddle methodology.
Alternatives to overcome the challenge of gathering team members at different locations for a huddle may include the use of one or more collaboration tools such as conference phone calls, video conferences, Internet relay chat (IRC), and instant messaging, among others. Nevertheless, the whiteboard is still the most commonly used tool in huddle boards, because the aforementioned collaboration tools are generic ways to connect people and may not offer a consistent way to be fully engaged in huddles. As a result, all team members must be physically located in the same room in order to be fully engaged in the huddle session.
Other alternatives to overcome the above drawbacks are systems configurations that enable remote huddle collaboration between team members of a given project content, which may take many forms including contact information, calendar items, mail, audio, photos, documents, and tasks or actions. A huddle user interface may include a predefined region for applications that can function as a home screen for a user, providing relevant content and quick access to collaboration tools. Applications' regions provide users with a predefined view or dashboard to monitor the current state of a subset of content obtainable through a computing device. Individual applications provide users with access to applications, application content, remote content and/or independent functionality. Typically, applications regions are represented in a small or thumbnail view that provides some minimal amount of information. One or more applications regions can provide a user with the data and tasks most likely to be relevant to the particular user. Nevertheless, it is likely that a library of applications may not meet the requirements of every huddle board.
Conventional approaches to meetings amongst remote users fail address all of the deficiencies of the conventional collaboration tools. A web meeting may allow a user to share a computer desktop with another user in a remote location. But the user must select which application should be presented on the computer desktop, so there is no ability to present a page that has information from multiple sub-applications that are dynamically updated. Further, the user cannot include annotations overlaid on the page that are simultaneously presented to the remote user and also stored with that particular page such that the particular page can be retrieved at a later date along with those annotations.
Moreover, conventional extranets are capable of sharing information from a common source, but these extranets do not offer real-time collaboration through real-time updates and simultaneous displays to other users. Further, these conventional extranets do not utilize sub-applications that dynamically display data associated with users simultaneously accessing the extranet. Conventional computer solutions do not offer the desired collaboration, real-time updating, dynamic presentation of data, and linking of additional content to the displayed data.
Therefore, there is still a need for a huddle user interface that allows users to create their own applications and optimize the presentation of content within a digital huddle environment.